


Orange You Glad

by Volant



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/M, Lack of Communication, Misunderstandings, Mutual Pining, bad jokes to come in later chapters, class clown jaime, fluff with a very small dash of angst, jaime tries to confess his love and it does not go well, serious athlete brienne
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-05
Updated: 2015-09-11
Packaged: 2018-04-19 03:20:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4730933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Volant/pseuds/Volant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jaime and Brienne have known each other for years. Jaime's always been the class clown, Brienne the straight-A student, but somehow their friendship works. Until Jaime decides to ruin everything, of course.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Knock Knock

Jaime thinks he’s hilarious.

            He thinks—mistakenly, of course—that sticking plastic straws in his nose at a _sit down restaurant_ and making little elephant noises is hysterical.

            The fact that Brienne chokes on her pea soup and spends the next ten minutes trying to draw breath doesn’t mean a thing.

            He thinks that making awful puns in the middle of the Human Sexuality section of their mandatory health class is off the wall.

            If Brienne has to take a speedy bathroom break right after the reproductive organ flash cards, and returns more than a little out of breath, and if Jaime stops firing off one-liners and grins at her for the entirety of the five seconds it takes her to stride across the room to her group, so what?

            “Admit it,” he says later, as they float on the pool that takes up most of the yard behind his big, empty house. “You _laughed_ , wench.”   He’s lounged out across one of those fluorescent rubber rafts, with one foot slung over the edge of Brienne’s inner tube so they don’t drift away from each other.

            “I,” Brienne replies, “did not.”

            She stretches one of her arms out and dangles the tips of her fingers in the cool, clear water, keeping her head carefully tilted towards the sun. It’s a warm day, and she knows that soon she’ll have a plethora of new freckles spread across her skin, but Jaime likes to float…and so does she. They’ve known each other for almost five years, but they’ve really only been friends for one—ever since they had to work together on a history project and discovered a mutual love for ancient action movies.

            They drift for a while before Jaime curls his leg and pulls her tube so that the two rafts are bumping together. Brienne slides her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose and looks over at him, careful not to let her gaze linger on the taut muscle of his calves, or the golden dusting of hair on his broad chest, or the hollow at the base of his throat that looks practically made to…

            Well.

            Instead, her eyes meet immediately with his green ones and that, if nothing else, is even worse. Brienne has devoted hours of her life to _not_ thinking about Jaime’s eyes. Not thinking about the way they seem to darken when he looks at her, or the way the skin around his eyes crinkle when he knows he’s finally found a chink in her armor. Not thinking about the way his dark blond eyelashes catch the sunlight. Definitely not thinking. 

            “Did too,” he argues as they stare at each other.

            “Did not,” Brienne huffs, and flops back onto the rubber raft as her lips begin to curl.

            “Oh,” he growls, and Brienne almost does laugh, then. “I see how it is.”

            Before Brienne can react, Jaime rolls off of his raft and into the cool water with a splash. She twists to watch his head dip beneath the blue water and disappear beneath her inner tube.

            “No,” she shouts, but it’s too late—her raft heaves and rolls and she splashes unceremoniously into the pool.

            When she surfaces, splashing and sputtering, Jaime is already bobbing a few feet away, a smile spreading across his face as he shakes his head and sends droplets of water flying.

            “I’m gonna _kill_ you,” Brienne cries, sloshing forward in the chest-deep water.

            “Aw,” Jaime pouts, even as he scrambles, with increasing speed, towards the stepladder. “Come on, wench. Tarth. _Brienne_ \--”

            The day Brienne realized that Jaime was ticklish was, without a doubt, one of the best days of her life. He’s shaking with laughter, before she’s even sloshed forward to brush her fingers against the sensitive flesh of his torso.

            “You think you’re so funny,” Brienne growls as she draws closer to him. She’s an inch or two taller than Jaime, and it’s the most satisfying thing—to draw herself up to her full height and look down at him as they stand face to face, so close their chests are almost touching. She can smell mix of chlorine and citrus shampoo on his wet hair.

            “Yeah,” Jaime leans forward, flicking his gaze down over her body and then back up again. “What are you going to do about it, Tarth?”

            Brienne knows it’s just flirting. That’s what Jaime does—he flirts and he pushes buttons, and he acts like a douche half the time. What he doesn’t do is catch her hands in his as she lunges forward and hold her there, laughing, so close to each other that their lips are almost touching.

            “I’m gonna kick your ass,” Brienne breathes. “That’s what.”

            “Uh huh,” Jaime says. One of his hands loosens around her wrist and beneath the pool’s surface, she can feel his thumb trace along her palm. “Like you could.”

            “I could.”

            “We should discuss it over dinner. And a movie.”

And there it is.

            “Right,” Brienne pulls away. “Funny, Jaime.”

            “I’m not _joking_.”

            “I think it’s time for me to go home.” She pulled herself onto the side of the pool. “It’s getting late.”

            “It’s, like, one o’clock,” Jaime sighed and sloshed after her. “Come on, Tarth.”

            “I promised Sansa that we’d study for that History test on Monday.” Brienne grabbed her towel off of one of the pool chairs and scrubbed her face dry, steadfastly ignoring the wet slap of Jaime’s feet on the ground.

            “You did not. Pod said she was going out of town this weekend. Why won’t you go out with me?”

            “Because, Jaime.” Brienne shrugged.

            “Because why?”

            “Oh, I don’t know,” she turns around, and there he is, standing too close again. The smile’s dropped off of his face, and been replaced with a look that reminds Brienne of those lions on the Discovery Channel. “Maybe because we fight all the time. And your whole family hates me. And I’m just…”

            “Just what, Brienne?” Jaime raises one eyebrow.

            “Well, look at me.” Brienne gestures to her body. “I’m huge. You said it yourself, I barely even look like a girl.”

            “So?” Jaime shook his head. “I don’t see what looks have to do with this. Besides, have you—have you _seen_ yourself? You’re built like a brick shithouse. You’re a fucking Amazon. You’ve got possibly the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen, and you’re telling me you won’t date me because of how you think I should care about your _looks_?”

            “I’ll see you later, Jaime,” Brienne slid her feet into her flip flops and knotted her towel around her waist.

            “Gods, Brienne. Don’t leave.”

            “I told you, I have to go.”     

            Jaime sighed, and ran a hand through his dripping hair. “Fine. Whatever.”

            Brienne nodded and turned to leave. Before she took two steps, he called out her name.

            “What?” She glanced over her shoulder, and into Jaime’s warm, green eyes.

            “We’re going to talk about this, Tarth.”

            “Okay.”

            “We _will_.”

           

           


	2. Punchline

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jaime and Brienne make up. Kind of.

            _What’s the difference between a watch and a wife?_

            Brienne watches the words flash across the screen of her phone. She’s curled up on the couch in her living room with a textbook propped up on her knees and a bowl of ice cream balanced in one hand.

            It’s the fifth opening line that Jaime’s sent her in two days, which isn’t exactly a surprise. He’s done it after every one of their fights—gives her a day to cool off, then shoots her a cheesy knock knock joke or a _really_ bad pun that he knows will get him at least one annoyed-looking emoji back. Brienne wants to ask him if this punchline is going to be as borderline sexist as it sounds.

            “Maybe I should text him back,” she says.

            “I think you should,” Sansa yells from across the hall. She’s in the kitchen, searching the cabinets for a decent study-session-appropriate box of tea.

            “He’ll just want to talk about it,” Brienne calls back. Jaime always insists on talking through their disagreements. Which makes sense, because he comes from an entire family of people that _won’t_. “I don’t want to.”

            “Brienne,” Sansa pokes her head around the doorjamb. “Pod says he’s freaking out. Could you at least let him know that you don’t hate him so he’ll get off my boyfriend’s back?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “Honey.” Sansa arches one pretty eyebrow. “All he did was ask you out on a date. Cut him some slack.”

            “Boys don’t just _ask me out_ ,” Brienne sighed. “They just don’t. Why would he want to…to…”

            “To what, take his relationship with his best friend, whose legs have been distracting him in class for literally years, and with whom he has possibly the healthiest relationship he’s ever experienced, to the next level? Gee, I wonder why.” Sansa sighed. “Do you have anything here that isn’t herbal?”

            “Above the fridge.”

            “Awesome,” Sansa gave Brienne a thumbs up and then disappeared back into the kitchen.

            Brienne glanced back down at her textbook, and then slammed it shut and leaned across the couch. She typed in her password and stared down at Jaime’s messages.

            _Is your refrigerator running?_

_What does a nosy pepper do?_

_Why was six afraid of seven?_

_How do you make Holy water?_

            Brienne looked at his last joke, takes a deep breath, and begins to type.

            _What’s the difference?_

And really, replying to one text doesn’t mean admitting to Jaime that she’s had what Sansa calls “a thing” for him since the eighth grade. When he’d winked at her from across their middle school auditorium, right before he broke Hyle Hunt’s crooked nose and got suspended for a week.

            They’re friends, and she can do friends. So she hits send, and then throws her phone down and gets up to help Sansa with the stove. When she returns, mug in hand, her screen’s lit up again.

            _Oh thank god_

_If a watch gets angry, it stops, but if a wife gets angry, she starts, get it_

_Where are u?_

 

            Sansa leaves a few minutes later, called away by a school-night curfew. Brienne puts away her textbook and turns on the evening news while she cleans up the kitchen and unloads the dishwasher. She barely hears the doorbell ring over the clunking mechanical noise that it makes.

            “Gods, Jaime,” she breathes when she cracks the door open and sees who It is. “What are you doing here?”

            Because there he is, standing on her doorstep and looking at her, in an old blue t-shirt with what looks like two days worth of stubble.

            “Brienne,” he says, and somehow sounds like he’s the one who’s just been surprised.

            “That’s my name,” she says. “What are you doing here?”

            “I wanted to talk.”

            “Jaime, it’s late,” Brienne says, but opens the door anyway. “My dad’s not home.”

            “So we’ll sit on the porch.” His eyes flicker over to meet her gaze.

            “Fine,” Brienne finds herself saying. She steps outside, into the crisp evening, and closes the door behind her, and pretends to ignore the way that Jaime’s smiling at her. “But not for long, okay?”

            “Okay. That’s fine.”

            They sit down right next to each other, on the top step of Brienne’s porch, and she doesn’t miss the way that he scoots over just enough, so that there’s no danger of their legs brushing. Something in her chest tightens up.

            “So,” he says, finally. Brienne glances over at him.

            “So,” she says.

            “I missed you.”

            “I missed your shitty jokes.” The words pour out of their mouths in quick succession, and Jaime whips around to stare at Brienne.

            “You did?” and just like that he’s gone from penitent to teasing. “I thought you _hated_ them.”

            “Gods,” Brienne sighs, and drops forward so that her head rests on her knees, and her knuckles scrape against the rough cement in a symbol of defeat. “You’ll never let me hear the end of this.”

            “No,” he says. “I really won’t.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! Thanks for all the positive reviews and kudos. I hope you like this little mid-chapter; I'll have the last part up by Sunday night.


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